The Democratic Party’s Growth Deficit

And now the Democrats take the stage and officially coronate the battered Hillary Clinton as the torch bearer for the party. She has slouched to the finish line. She is tired and the country is tired of her. Sorry, Democrats, no do-overs. You’re stuck with her.

But it isn’t just Hillary who is out of touch and in tragic decline, it’s the whole Democratic Party. My friends at the American Enterprise Institute reported last week that the Democratic platform is silent on “economic growth.” Maybe that is because across the country during the past eight years of Obamanomics economic growth has been silent.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. We have had 2% growth under Obama, but that’s an economy treading water. It’s sister-kissing growth that, yes, has thankfully kept us out of recession, but doesn’t lead to much if any rise in living standards.

Just as Obama refuses to utter the words “Islamic terrorism,” now the whole party can’t seem to bring itself to endorse “economic growth.” For the left, growth isn’t really the goal. They want redistribution of wealth.

The language of a party platform doesn’t matter much, if at all. But if you’re not FOR growth, you probably aren’t going to produce it, just as if you’re not even trying to get in shape, it’s a good bet you’re not going to shed those extra 16 pounds.

Amazingly, the last great growth hawk of the Democratic Party of modern times, John F. Kennedy, ran against Republican Richard Nixon in 1960 on the issue of the “growth deficit.” The economy in the 1950s was fairly prosperous, much more so than over the last eight years. But JFK said we can “do bettah” and convinced Americans we could see much faster wage gains with greater opportunities.

Through tax cuts and free trade the JFK era sparked growth rates of 4%, 5% and even 6% in the go-go ’60s until LBJ crashed the economy with New Deal welfare statism.

Now we have this weird austerity-worship that has taken over the party. The rich and businesses are portrayed as scalpers and scoundrels. And employers are exploiters in the “you didn’t build that” mindset. Radical environmentalists, a bedrock of the party, are anti-growth and believe that when people get richer, it’s worse for the planet. (They should go live in India or Mexico City and see how well the environment is doing there.) They ridicule what they call “growth-mania” on the right. Human economic activity, they warn, is causing catastrophic global warming.

Perhaps this explains the litany of economic failures during the Obama years.

We have had $8 trillion of new debt, minimum-wage increases, Obamacare, an $800 billion stimulus plan with “shovel-ready” projects, tax increases on the rich, more than $100 billion in green energy subsidies, auto company and union pension bailouts, re-regulation of the financial industry and banks, and a Fed that has manufactured near-zero short term interest rates for seven years with up to $4 trillion of bond acquisitions. All of these were designed primarily to redistribute income, and so is it a shock that they haven’t produced growth?

Poor Hillary Clinton has the unenviable task of persuading Americans to open up wide and swallow four more years of this swill.

Here’s a question that Donald Trump and Mike Pence should be asking every day: What would Hillary offer that is any different? She is promising minimum-wage increases, tax hikes on the rich, and more infrastructure spending. This is new? This is change?

The left’s defense of growth anemia is that 2% growth is the new normal, so get used to it. Obama’s first economic guru, Larry Summers, calls this: secular stagnation that is here to stay. This past week at a Politico economic forum I made the claim that we could have 4% growth easily and the jaws of the media dropped in collective disbelief, as if I suggested that we could suspend the laws of gravity.

Actually 4% growth isn’t that hard to achieve. A pro-America energy-production policy, including putting coal back in business, could produce $150 billion more output each year. Another percentage ‎point of growth could come from tax reform, with reductions in business taxes to spur investment and hiring, according to the folks at the Tax Foundation.

But Democrats will never get us there because they aren’t even trying. They will celebrate 2% growth — the weakest recovery — in half a century — as a glittering achievement. The party that once stood with the working class now says Americans have to work more and settle for less. That’s not just wrong; it’s sad.

Quotes & Notes

"Terrorism flourishes because they are protected by a Left-wing denial industry" . --- author unknown

"Facts are rarely allowed to contaminate the big-government utopian delusion of the Left" -- author unknown

"Without double standards, the Left/Statists/Liberals would have no standards at all" -- author unknown

"The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!" -- Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher

"And what is Fascism? Fascism is private ownership, private enterprise, but total government control and regulation. Well, isn’t this the liberal philosophy?

Liberals value theory over truth and facts

The conservative, so-called, is the one that says ‘less government, get off my back, get out of my pocket, and let me have more control of my own destiny.'" -Ronald Reagan

"Liberals sense of moral righteousness doesn't come from achievement - it comes from believing that you are a bad person... for a Liberal to be morally superior, they must paint Conservatives as morally inferior, even if they have to lie. It's an unearned sense of moral superiority."

"The left no longer makes arguments about policies' effectiveness. Their only argument is character assassination"

"The religion of Leftism supersedes the law, fairness or personal integrity."

"...liberals are big fans of freedom speech, freedom of expression, freedom of anything and everything - unless, of course, they disagree with whatever the “anything or everything” is." - Adam Corolla

"I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep money you've earned, but not greed to want to take someone else's money". - Thomas Sowell

"Have I not destroyed my enemy when I have made him into my friend?" -Abraham Lincoln

"The most intolerant people I've ever met are those Liberals who consider themselves most tolerant." -MB

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

"Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so." -Ronald Reagan

"The problem with Socialism (Liberalism) is that eventually, you run out of other peoples money" - Margaret Thatcher

"If you think criminals and lunatics are going to obey gun control laws, you're a special kind of stupid" -MB

"One thing you have to say about the Left: They never miss an opportunity to let the mask of hatred slip. It’s practically Pavlovian; they are so invested in the myth of their own righteousness that their “tolerance” fetish goes right out the window whenever they suffer the slightest affront to their delusional notion of how the world works." - Michael Walsh